points in a student’s
program Assessment is
required, and this was
recirculated. Faculty
mentors were instructed to
inform the Graduate
Secretary when these
events have taken place for
a student, so that she can
send out the assessment
materials to the relevant
individuals. We are
currently seeking to identify
other means by which we
can track assessment
compliance by our faculty,
which continues to be a
challenge for our
assessment programs. We
will therefore start
evaluating student
performance on this SLO in
the 2012-2013 year.
SLO 1b: A graduate student
should be able to present
and defend a research plan.
Link to UNCW Learning
Goal: Thoughtful expression
and Information literacy
Prospectus is successfully
presented to the
department. Form used for
this assessment is our
Graduate Student
Prospectus Symposium
Evaluation form. Our
assessment tool will be
question #5. This SLO was
created, in part, to help
understand the poor
performance of students on
“breadth of knowledge” in
SLO2 in the 2007-08 year.Each student in the program
is assessed by all faculty
members in the department
attending the Graduate
Student Prospectus
symposium. Data on each
student’s project in terms of
quality, design and
significance are collected.
Assessment of this SLO
began in Spring 2009. By
the nature of data
collection, assessment for
this SLO is pooled with the
Biology M.Sc. program.During 2011-2012, we
collected 123 responses.
Faculty deemed student
performance on this SLO to
be excellent with 99% of
students to be satisfactory
(63%) or above
(commendable, 36%).
These numbers are similar
to previous years. In 2011,
faculty determined that 98%
of the students were
performing well in this SLO,
with 40% of projects rated
as “commendable”, 58% as
“satisfactory” and only 2%The faculty discussed the
results of assessment to
date at the 2012 retreat and
decided that our students
are meeting our
expectations in this SLO and
that no action will be taken.